Trigger wasn't just a horse!

Frenchman River near Val Marie, Saskatchewan - Grasslands country

"Donald Trump (is/isn’t) a racist."

Grammatically speaking, racist in this sentence is a predicate adjective, an adjective placed in the predicating part of the sentence to modify (clarify, expand on) the sentence subject. It’s structure is the same as in the sentences, “Trigger is a horse,” or “King David was a bigamist.”

But most of us yawn at grammar niceties, so let’s simply say that using this sentence structure signals something that may not be intended, that may be harmful, and in a courtroom (with a judge who paid attention when he sat in English class in high school) might even be ruled to be slanderous or libelous. To say that someone is a racist, a bigamist, a procrastinator . . . or a horse, invites the inference that that adjective nails down the subject’s essential characteristic. It’s possibly justifiable in Trigger’s case, but nowhere else, really.

Because we’re all racists. We all attach prejudgments to people based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, age and sometimes race. It’s the kind of knee-jerk evaluation we make when we’re short of knowledge about people so that their appearance, their dress, their way of speaking leads to assumptions that may or may not have any merit. To do a racist thing, make a racist comment simply means that an assumption is being made based not on knowledge

 . . . but on a racial stereotype.

Adjectives modify (clarify, expand on) nouns, but when used to modify an action, we call them adverbs. Consider this: Donald Trump racistically decided to call African countries “s**tholes.” The racism attaches to the action, naming the quality of an incident or decision, not the person. And we all know that labels applied to people can be exceedingly harmful in general, life-destroying in some cases.

There are people who occasionally make racist remarks, occasionally engage in racist acts. I’m in that group, I think. There are also people who make a habit of applying racially based stereotypes, people like those KKK and white supremacist group members who literally believe that merit can be accurately deduced from skin colour, for instance. To label an individual KKK member as a racist, though, implies that this prejudice in him is his essential characteristic, and that would simply repeat his error.

People are never justly summed up in one word. Even Trigger is unjustly labeled as “simply a horse.” Ask Roy Rogers if you doubt this.

Dropping a racist remark doesn’t make me “just a racist.” It means that I haven’t finished my education yet and should probably wash my mouth out with soap, sit in the corner for a few hours with a grammar text and an encyclopedia.

And for those of us who believe we ought to do our bit to make the world better, we could begin by weighing our own words more carefully, by calling out racially-motivated actions in government, in business, in the social structures of our time. We need to learn and practice the difference between the adverbial and the adjectival use of our labels, for a start!

In the end, nothing worthwhile is accomplished by arriving at a consensus that Trump is or is not a racist, although people seem right now to be obsessed with this quest. His pseudo-presidency has included any number of acts that should long since have disqualified him as a leader, some to which an apparent racist motivation could certainly be applied. Would be nice if more of what the man does and says could be motivated by humility, by empathy, by courtesy.

One can always hope that sometime a light, an epiphany will break through. One can only hope.